The Desegregation and Resegregation of Charlotte’s Schools

The footage from Charlotte, North Carolina, following the killing, by police, of Keith Lamont Scott reflected a scene that has become all too familiar over the past several years.

Photograph by Sean Rayford / Getty

Recently, protesters and police clashed in the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, following the killing of Keith Lamont Scott, a forty-three-year-old father of seven, who had recently moved to the city with his wife and family. Scott was shot by officers who were searching for a man with an outstanding warrant. Scott was not that man. Officer accounts claim that Scott had a handgun and refused to comply when he got out of his car. Other witnesses say that Scott was actually holding a book, as he often read while waiting for the bus to return his son from elementary school.

The footage from Charlotte reflected a scene that has become all too familiar over the past several years: police cocooned in riot gear, their bodies encased in bulletproof vests and military-style helmets; protesters rendered opaque by the tear gas that surrounds them, scarves covering their mouths and noses to keep from inhaling the smoke.

These protests happened because of Keith Lamont Scott, but they also happened because Charlotte is a city that has long had deep racial tensions, and frustration has been building for some time. There are many places one might look to find the catalyst of this resentment, nationally and locally. But one of the first places to look is Charlotte’s public-school system.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and thus unconstitutional. The decision mandated that schools across the country be integrated, though, in reality, little actual school desegregation took place following the ruling. It took years for momentum from the civil-rights movement to create enough political pressure for truly meaningful integration to take place in classrooms across the country.

To understand what happened next, it helps to turn to a book published last year and edited by Roslyn Arlin Mickelson, Stephen Samuel Smith, and Amy Hawn Nelson, "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte." It uses essays by sociologists, political scientists, economists, and attorneys to illuminate how the city became the focal point of the national school-desegregation debate, with decisions that set a precedent for the rest of the country.

In 1964, a black couple, the Reverend Dr. Darius Swann and his wife, Vera Swann, attempted to enroll their son James in Seversville Elementary School, one of the few integrated schools in the city and one that was closer to their home than the one he attended. The Swanns’ request was denied, and James was told that he must attend an all-black school in a different neighborhood. The N.A.A.C.P. sued on behalf of the family and the case moved to the federal district court.

The ruling came down in 1969, and James McMillan, the judge presiding over the case, ruled in favor of the Swann family, ordering and then overseeing the implementation of a large-scale busing program, which would go on to make the school system for Charlotte and surrounding Mecklenburg County a case study in integration. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld the decision, and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education concretized what Brown v. Board had put into motion more than a decade before. District after district modelled its integration plans on Charlotte, and the city was lauded as an example of what successful integration could look like. By 1980, the school district had reached an unprecedented level of integration. In 1984, the Charlotte Observer editorial board stated, “Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline or its strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools.”

The success of the integration program lasted for almost three decades, until William Capacchione, a white parent, sued the school district because he believed his daughter was not admitted into a local magnet school because of her race. Over the course of the trial, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board forcefully defended its desegregation plan. But in 1999 Federal District Court Judge Robert Potter—who as a private citizen had been active in the anti-busing movement of the nineteen-sixties—ordered the district to stop using race in pupil assignments. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, fearful of seeing three decades of desegregation work wiped away, appealed the decision. However, in 2001 the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Capacchione and the other parents who joined him on the case, ending the mandatory-busing program.

Under the new “Family Choice Plan,” students were largely made to attend the schools in their neighborhood. But most neighborhoods in Charlotte are deeply segregated and racially homogenous communities, as a result of decades of housing segregation, and so schools that were once integrated and high-achieving soon became stratified by race and income. In 2005, as part of a separate, and far-reaching, case originally brought against the state of North Carolina for its failing school system, Judge Howard Manning issued a report on the state of schools in Charlotte. He concluded, “The most appropriate way for the Circuit to describe what is going on academically at CMS’s bottom ‘8’ high schools is academic genocide for the at-risk, low-income children.”

When Charlotte-Mecklenburg eliminated race as a factor in student assignment, it not only meant less diverse schools; it also created a feedback loop that made the problem worse. Families with the means—most often white families—started to move into whiter neighborhoods, where they knew their kids would go to whiter schools. As a result of the relationship between race and wealth, the social, political, and economic capital became ever more concentrated in a small number of very white neighborhoods.

The power of the 1999 court order and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ subsequent racial stratification is perhaps best evidenced by a conspicuous change in the school system’s vision statements over a twenty-year period. In 1991, the vision statement read, "The Vision is to ensure that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System becomes the premier, urban integrated system in the nation in which all students acquire the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to live rich and full lives as productive and enlightened members of society." Today, it reads, "Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools provides all students the best education available anywhere, preparing every child to lead a rich and productive life." That the word “integrated” was no longer a part of the district’s self-espoused vision for itself reflects a dwindling sense of political possibility to build a truly desegregated school system.

Some might wonder why a commitment to school desegregation matters. Can't we just inject more resources into poor schools so that they have the opportunity to compete on an equal playing field? But research has long shown that singularly investing capital into a school in which the vast majority of students live in poverty has limited impact on achievement. The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools—irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class—are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones. Students in integrated K-12 schools are more likely to both enroll in and graduate from college. While the most disadvantaged students—most often poor students of color—receive the most considerable academic benefits from attending diverse schools, research demonstrates that young people in general, regardless of their background, experience profound benefits from attending integrated schools. As the editors of “Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” make clear, "Students who attend desegregated schools exhibit greater levels of intergroup friendships, demonstrate lower levels of racial fears and stereotypes, and experience less intergenerational perpetuation of racism and stereotypes across multiple institutional settings."

The racial composition of schools affects the quality of the teachers, too. A 2009 study by Kirabo Jackson in the Journal of Labor Economics found that as student populations in Charlotte-Mecklenburg became increasingly black, the most qualified teachers transferred to other schools. In other words, the more a school resegregated, the less qualified the teachers became. Additionally, school segregation was deeply correlated with the likelihood of a student becoming entangled in the criminal-justice system. In Charlotte, the chances of black males coming into contact with the criminal-justice system increased with the resegregation of their high schools.

There is also an economic imperative to move toward integration. School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration. Higher earnings mean more tax revenue. Decreased incarceration means less money spent keeping people in prison. All of which means more money for localities.

One cannot disentangle the state-sanctioned school resegregation that poor black students in Charlotte experience from the police killing of a black man waiting for his son to get off the bus from elementary school. The sociopolitical history of a city in a county with one of the lowest levels of upward mobility among all major metropolises is not a peripheral concern in an analysis of the racial tensions of the moment, it is the foundation of it. Schools are the single largest lever of mobility in this country. When we commit to creating and enforcing laws that acknowledge the injustice of the past, we open up the possibility of using schools as a means of reducing inequality. When we operate as if the past is irrelevant, and propose ostensibly race-neutral policies in a deeply racialized world, we inevitably create social institutions that perpetuate that social stratification. The school system in Charlotte did not resegregate by accident, just as police in Charlotte did not perceive Keith Lamont Scott as a danger by accident. The country we live in is one that we have built to be this way. The cities we live in were built this way. They were court-ordered. They were signed into law. We made these choices, and now we see the consequences.

Clint Smith is a writer, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, and the author of “Counting Descent.”